Dear Phil,
Thanks for the link, but this isn’t a Labour blog.
Cheers,
Ben
(Forgive that moment of self-indulgence, dear reader. We shall have more on the report later, hopefully, but in the meantime do check out this post from MayorWatch.)
Update: Phil has now clarified his reference:
“the Watch franchise are only not Labour to the extent that they consider the Blair/Brown Labour party to be right wing”
Don’t forget that if you are not satisfied with this element of the Watch franchise you can (but aren’t necessarily advised to) drop in at other branches including UK Watch, Aaronovitch Watch, Migration Watch, Horowitz Watch, Spin Watch, PR Watch, Hitchens Watch, Greenwich Watch, Blair Watch (which should have been called the Blair Watch Project but hey ho), LGF Watch, Blears Watch, Malkin Watch, Olbermann Watch, Steyn Watch, Terry Watch, Norman Baker Watch, and, of course, the other Boris Watch.
5 responses so far ↓
Don’t worry about Phil. He’s still fighting the Cold War from his dugout in Ealing.
Oh, has Mr. Oyster-Bus-Fares-Are-£1.50 been let out again - I’m so glad I don’t live in Northfields any more.
If he’s reading this, a message:
Hey, dimwit, does the fact that I *co-write a blog attacking Tony Blair* and *contributed to Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes’ Little Red Book Of New Labour Sleaze* (and went to the thank-you party and got drunk with Fawkes and James Cleverly, as it happens) mean I’m a fully-paid up member of the Labour Party? I hate the current Labour Party like the plague, they’re, with a few honourable exceptions, a bunch of charlatans and arseholes leading a bunch of frightened sheep, and the political wilderness is too good for them.
What they need is someone like Ken Livingstone.
From his Guardian profile:
‘Phil Taylor is a blogging Tory councillor from Ealing in west London with a special interest in the London mayoralty. With a technical and sales background it is always the numbers that count with him.’
It’s a shame he doesn’t bother checking them then.
Blears Watch, if it’s the original, was me, as a spoof.
And yes, Phil’s numerical inexactitude has been noted before - he’s got the right idea, but (unlike me) won’t analyse the figures objectively and report them even if they contradict his received opinions. His comment on Dave Hill’s blog that Livingstone was lying over the revenue raised by emissions-based CC would carry more weight if he’d represented the scheme properly - it was only the least polluting Band A+B cars that would have a 100% discount, which would be partly or wholly offset by the removal of the Alternative Fuel Discount.
While not wholly in favour of the scheme, I can see the merit in replacing a perverse set of incentives (the current scheme encourages you to buy a hybrid Lexus instead of a super-economical band A micromini) with a slightly less perverse set.
The FAP report touches on an important issue: the accountability deficit of directly-elected Mayors. The Assembly doesn’t have the power to apply any sanctions to the Mayor if he/she oversteps the mark. The Assembly can only ask questions and hope to embarrass the Mayor, but it cannot remove the Mayor.
Taylor tries to spin this into a criticism of Livingstone by saying that Livingstone “relished” his lack of accountability, but doesn’t present any evidence for this “relish” for lack of accountability. It is a structural problem of a system of directly-elected Mayors. I think that Tony Blair was originally in favour of directly-elected Mayors (if he did indeed think through the issue) because he had a modernising vision of thrusting NuLab mayors cutting through the red-tape of Old Labour councils, and probably many sections of the Conservative Party have a similar vision. Blair lost his enthusiasm when it became clear that directly-elected Mayors might turn out to be people with an independent turn of mind like Livingstone. As far as I know the Tories don’t have a clear view on this issue at the moment but we should keep an eye on where Boris, Taylor and the Tories take this issue.